Maybe there is a point in life where we are just tired of being covered in the dust and grit and realize we’ve been played into thinking it is more than just dirt. I had become so dissatisfied with my life that I thought wishing on stars was a waste of time. Dreams don’t really come true and dropping wishes into a pool of water was just a means to get rid of pennies from weighing down the bottom of my handbag. Yeah, I had it bad in believing miracles were possible anymore. I was being pitiful, I know. After many times being tossed down and beaten up by life I just didn’t know if it was worth trying to reach the stars again. Maybe I just needed to settle into something like everyone else and give up the big dreams of something more.
That’s what I did too. I dug into my work, daily life and tried to make the best of it. I packed up the idea of having a dream for a wonderful life and settled for a normal one. At least I could try and get ahead of the bills, maybe save up for a vacation next year and get into the latest series on Netflix in my spare time. Those are good adult goals. Living the good life looks like those things doesn’t it? That’s what I wanted was a good life but maybe I had just had the wrong of idea of what that looked like or how you build it. Believing in stars and wishing for wonderful dreams was not productive and couldn’t lead to anything useful in the course of making a good life happen.
The problem was I still was getting knocked down. I gave in and drank the proverbial adult Kool-aid of just taking what comes and I was still not coming out ahead. Most importantly to me, I was also at the mercy of someone else making decisions that impacted my life. At any given moment someone else could decide they didn’t need to pay my salary anymore. They could decide my performance wasn’t worth a raise this year or that I didn’t deserve as big a bonus. They could decide if I could moved up. Having been on the losing end of all those situations before I wasn’t comfortable with someone else making those decisions in my life, telling me how high I could climb in reaching stars. So was I just not cut from the same cloth as others? Why couldn’t I just take what was handed to me and be grateful?
First, I was deeply grateful and still am for the job I have that provides for my family. I’m grateful for the paychecks. I’m grateful for the times I could count on it. However, in brutal honest I’m realistic in knowing how susceptible and risky my dependence on a job is when it comes to financial security. It can all go away in a snap of someone else’s fingers without our my knowing or input. That risk happens in reality way too often to all of us and it can quickly become devastating. It is a risk I have experienced firsthand and it is a risk that leaves me constantly uncomfortable in my corporate career. It is what I believe causes all of us to stop being who we are to do what we must to keep these jobs in hopes of reducing that risk so we can continue being dependent on them to provide for us. In brutal honesty, it is a messed up situation where many of us end up on the short end of the stick.
I believe wishing for things to be alright or to get lucky with something puts limits on us. It prevents us from acting and instead makes us wait. Waiting on something or someone to come in and fix, improve, change what is going on in our lives. It puts limits on how high we can climb or how far we can go in life. I think wishes are great but the best ones are those we put into action and build into reality ourselves. Luck is for the lucky and I’ve never met too many lucky people in my life.
So maybe it’s not that I don’t believe in miracles, having dreams come true and wishes coming to fruition. I think the problem is we give up on our wishes and think they just happen by luck. Yes, they can happen but it is when we do more than just wish or dream for them and we dare to look beyond that single idea, wish or dream. They happen when we do something to trigger the chain reaction of things that make them possible. For me that trigger started when I actively chose to no longer just settle in a job where my fate and livelihood were dependent on someone else’s decision. When I chose to put into place other things I directly controlled to offset and reduce that dependency.
The more we take control of our own life and experience what that means, the less we tolerate letting someone else tell us how high or far we can go. We realize the glass ceiling is something that blocks the view of the stars and our own ability in building a stairway to reach them. I believe more than a wish on a star it is much more powerful to touch a star and look out into the universe of what is possible. The star is only the gateway reminding us to work for what we want and not let anyone tell us it cannot be done.
As we prepare to go into 2021, I invite you to consider how you can change what you settle for today because life has beat the wishes out of you. Where have your wishes become little packed up ideas that maybe one day will be true if you’re lucky. Reclaim them and let’s build that structure to help you capture the opening in the stars for where life really begins. Let’s go! dragonspitapothecary.com/grow